So declared the Tamil Brahmin editors in the first volume of Prabuddha Bharata or Awakened India, an English-language monthly journal started in 1896 to popularise Vivekananda's work in India and abroad. The introduction claimed that Vedanta – code for Hinduism – had been steadily making ‘converts’ in the West, its illustrious lineage stretching from Immanuel Kant and the ‘Upanishad-intoxicated Schopenhauer’ to the Theosophist Annie Besant and Orientalist Max Müller. Vivekananda represented the culmination in such a narrative, fulfilling the role Vedanta was destined to play on the world stage. Showcasing the conversion of Western men and women like Kripananda (Leon Landsberg) and Abhayananda (Mary Louise) to Vedantic Hinduism deepened that claim.

Every volume of the Prabuddha Bharata and Brahmavadin, the two English journals started by Vivekananda's Indian disciples with generous contributions from Western patrons, covered in detail the various exploits of their master and his interpretation of Vedanta. Disciples in Madras were as or even more active than their counterparts in Bengal, a point often underemphasised in situating either Vivekananda or Vedanta within India.1 In the columns of Prabuddha Bharata and Brahmavadin, Vivekananda's ‘conquest’ of the West became a distinctive metaphor that entered Indian public discourse and spoke to forms of Hindu cultural nationalism that steadily grew in the twentieth century.